Weather bodes ill for Iowa pheasants

WALKER – Weather trumps habitat in the lives of pheasants, according to a hunter who for the past 25 years has managed a northern Linn County farm to maximize production of the popular but increasingly rare game birds.

“My pheasant population has declined by about 65 percent in the past three years. Since the habitat has not changed, I have to think the cold, snowy winters and wet spring nesting seasons are taking their toll,” said Mike Bergman of Mount Vernon, who hunted his pheasant haven Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010, with his little dog, Rudy.

As recently as three years ago, Bergman's 240-acre farm teemed with pheasants like a scene from a South Dakota tourism promotion video. On every hunt, flocks of 50 or more birds would burst from sections of the farm's seemingly limitless assortment of switch grass plots stitched together by willow and plum thickets and copses of ragweed.

Now Bergman rations the birds, limiting hunters to one rooster apiece – exactly what he and Rudy harvested on a two-hour hunt Thursday.

Standing knee-deep in fresh snow, Rudy at his side, Bergman said the scene reminds him of mid-January. “I was hoping for a mild winter, but it looks like we're in for another rough one,” he said.

State Climatologist Harry Hillaker concurs. The first three weeks of  December have been about 10 degrees colder than normal in Eastern Iowa  and much snowier than normal throughout northeastern Iowa, where snowfall totals have ranged from 10.1  inches in Marion to 21 inches in Dubuque and 30 inches in Waukon, he said.

Based on the wintry December and the peaking of La Nina – periodic colder than normal water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean – Hillaker said he thinks it likely that Iowans will suffer their fifth straight snowier than normal winter and their fourth-straight colder than normal winter.

“Iowa has always had bad winters. What's new is having so many of them in a row,” said Todd Bogenschutz, the Department of Natural Resources' exasperated manager of upland game.

After the bad winter of 2000-2001, for example, in which Iowa recorded a statewide average of 42 inches of snow, pheasants rebounded during the following two years, which had comparable snowfall averages of 15 and 16 inches, Bogenschutz said.

The comparable numbers during the past four winters have been 47, 32, 42 and 30 – all well above the long-term statewide winter average of 25 inches of snow.

“Instead of getting a bounce, it's been hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer,” Bogenschutz said.

Throw in wet springs and major floods in 2008 and 2010, and the pheasants outlook gets worse, he said.

“Climate has to be there first and foremost for pheasants to recover,” Bogenschutz said. Consecutive bad winters drive down the hen population to a point where it is not mathematically possible to recover in a single year, he said.

Stocking pen-raised pheasants, with their limited ability to survive in the wild, would be a waste of money, according to Bogenschutz. Even stocking transplanted wild pheasants, which would be expensive and logistically difficult, would be of little benefit unless Iowa's climate returns to more hospitable parameters, he said.

“If wild hens can't survive the winter, transplanted wild hens can't either,” he said.

While Bergman wishes for a milder winter, his dog seems delighted with the status quo.

Three years ago, he was an abandoned pup of mixed parentage wandering half-starved, dehydrated and scratched up on a trail at the Whitewater Canyon near the Jones-Dubuque county line.

“He was just waiting for us on the trail. I didn't really want a dog, but I couldn't leave him there like that,” Bergman said.

After trying to find the pup's owner and, failing that, trying vainly to find him a home, Bergman adopted the pup, who has since evolved into an excellent pointer and retriever.

Now Rudy has a good home, a job he loves, an appreciative boss and a 240-acre workplace with some of Eastern Iowa's finest pheasant habitat.